I recently came across Hereditree. It is a fairly new genealogy program. The website claims copyright 2005-2008, but there is no version history on the website.
I am guessing the name is a play on a particular pronunciation of "hereditary". Anyway, the home page invites me to "Say hello to Easy to Use Genealogy Software", and promises that it will be "Easier to Navigate...", "Easier to Record..." and "Easier to Review..." (your data). That’s an appealing bunch of promises to anyone still using bad user interface genealogy software (I am trying hard not to mention TMG and Brother’s Keeper. Oops...).
The home page also lists "10 Reasons to Choose Hereditree as your Genealogy Software". I understand the desire to push its best features in your face, but the first thing that flashed through me head was "GenoPro". GenoPro has an "11 Essential Features You need for your Genealogy Software" flash animation on its home page. Sadly, not only are some features, such as genograms, really not essential to genealogy software at all, GenoPro also rather embarrassing failed to meet its own criteria.
I looked over the list of features, and some are silly. Colour coded source quality? It may be a nice touch, but it is not exactly the Earth-shattering feature you’ve been waiting for that is going to make you give up your current program in a hurry. Some others features sound more convincing, like the ability to see all children, not just those of the current relationship, and show half siblings along full siblings.
Hereditree is commercial closed-source software developed by Hereditree Pty Ltd, an Australian company. A button to download a free trial is right on the home page. The trial allows importing large databases, but does not allow editing of databases containing more than 49 individuals.
The download is less than 5 MB, and you do not have give any details or suffer annoying download scripts. Neither the download page nor the file indicates the version number. Once started, the Setup Wizard informs me I am about to install Hereditree 2008. There are no difficult choices to make. The Wizard suggests an installation folder, and allows you to change. I merely change the suggested drive letter and continue. The Wizard offers to create a Program Folder, a desktop icon, a Quick Launch icon and associate the *.htr extension with Hereditree. All these are options that are checked by default, but can be unchecked. Once finished, the Wizard offers to start the program.
The program displays a splash screen when starting up. If you were not aware yet, that screen reminds you the software is Australian by displaying the Southern Cross. When I check the About box, it turns out that I have version 2008.0401.
The program never tries to connect to the Internet. It does not download news or updates, and the Register menu items tells you to visit their website to obtain a key.
I saw the word "sample" flash by when the Wizard was installing, so I decide to look for and open the sample file, but there is no sample database in the Hereditree directory, and there is no Hereditree directory in the My Documents folder either. There is a help file, but a search for "sample" does not turn up anything.
Well, there actually is a sample database, apparently just not mentioned in the documentation, and not in the most obvious spot. However, it is in Hereditree directory in the Application Data folder for All Users. That does not feel right to me. All Users did not install this application, I did. This is a personal program, and All Users do not want to be bothered by my personal software installations. The sample file is rather small; just 103 members of the Windsor family.
I considered moving the sample file, but that move would probably not work well with the de-installation program, and I might forget about deleting it myself. It would in fact not work well with the Hereditree program itself. I did not need have to search for the file. If I had only bothered to look at the menu first, I would have noticed the File | Sample menu item.
The program has a menu and a button bar. Until you open a database, the menu is rather small and all the buttons are greyed out. I was expecting the menu to get bigger after loading a file, but it does not. It simply is a small menu. It is as clean as it gets, but it makes you wonder about the features.
I only discovered that there is something seriously wrong with the menu and button bar after working with the program for a while. Some menus that should should be on the main menu do only drop down from a button instead. That is neither intuitive nor user-friendly. I expect menus to be on the main menu, and buttons to either have an immediate effect or bring up a dialog box.
Several menus are not even behind a button, but can only be found behind button-like menu on a pop-up dialog.
The program display a progress bar while loading a database, but no numbers that help you gauge how long the loading is going to take.
With many genealogy programs, getting started is a bit awkward; until you actually enter at least one person, the program display nothing. Not so with Hereditree. It display its main view whether there is data or not.
The main view shows boxes for individuals in four generations. Hereditree claims it is five, but I count four; grandparents, parents, current and children. It additionally displays the number of grandchildren, and will display their names in a modal dialog if you right-click that number. It will also show some details on great-grandparents if you mouse over the little boxes representing them, but the main view shows only four generations.
The boxes for the current generation, parents and grandparents show all vital data, but the box for the children and siblings show years, names and number of grandchildren only. When you hover the mouse over these, it will display birth and death dates just above that box. I was a bit confused at first to find that sometimes this works, sometimes it does not. It shows the full dates if you hover over the years, not if you hover over the name.
The main view is certainly easy to navigate. Just click any name to make it the current person. Moreover, because it displays all children and all siblings, navigating complex families is a lot easier than in most other programs, where you have to select a different spouse first to see other children.
The program also has a selection history. It shows which individuals where selected during this session. This is not unlike the browse history of a browser, but it lacks the easy forward and backward buttons.
The problem with the main view is that it is too easy to navigate; it is near impossible to not navigate. The problem is that Hereditree does not distinguish between selecting and choosing. Most programs do distinguish, and allow you to click once to merely select something, and double click to choose something and a trigger some action. When you merely select something, it is highlighted, but nothing else happens. Not so in Hereditree, when you select an individual, you immediately choose that individual and the display changes to make that individual the central one. Just one click in the wrong place and your screen changes. That is not just annoying, it is plain wrong.
One feature you would expect is the ability to double-click on an empty box to add say a father. This is not supported. The only way to add persons is by choosing the appropriate menu item - from the menu that drops down from the Add button.
The major limitation of this program is that the main view is really the only view. The only other views are a few modal dialog boxes that will pop up when you make certain choices, and need to be closed again to continue working. Another genealogy program it shares this user interface design flaw with is Aldfaer.
Actually, some dialogs seem to be modeless, and it is possible for these modeless dialogs to become hidden behind the main window. At one moment I was working in the main window, and then discovered that a Person dialog was still open. That a few attempts to deliberately repeat this experience were not successful suggests that this experience resulted from an accidental defect instead of a deliberate design. The design seems to one main window with modal dialog boxes.
Weirdly, the additional dialog boxes seem to have their buttons along the top. What is really going on is that the dialogs do not have buttons at all, but that they do have dialog menus that have been styled to look like buttons. It is strange and rather user-unfriendly. What’s so hard about offering real buttons in the customary places?
There are no options. Luckily, the default colours are quite workable. It initially seemed that File | New defaults to creating databases in My Documents, but I soon found that it actually default to the last directory you used.
The program and the documentation are in English, the Installation Wizard is the only part in Amglish. The program does not support other languages.
The program does not support the generation of websites and there seem to be no reports. This program does not offer a single menu item for creating reports.
Source citations may support colour coded quality, but are too simple for the serious researcher. The program does not distinguish between citations and sources and does not let you identify repositories either.
The first impression is that this simply is a simple program, that should perhaps be appreciated by considering its lack of features and options as a feature. It is just aiming to be simple and easy to use. To a large extent, it succeeds. Of course, anyone using this will have use something else to generate reports or web sites. Hereditree focuses on data entry and browsing. Still, the lack of reports for problems like impossible dates, possible duplicates, incomplete places names and such makes it clear that the data focus is not a strong focus.
Alas, the truth is not so simple. The program does support reports, there are just no menu items for it. You have to press the reports button on the button bar. There is no keyboard shortcut.
There are not just a few basic reports, but they do look nice, and you can export the reports to Adobe PDF. The four reports support are a one-page pedigree chart, an individual report, a family group sheet and a descendants report.
Hereditree does not provide a report that provides an overview of all known ancestors. The one-page pedigree chart is limited to just one page of four generations. I looked for ways to get more generations or more pages, but in vain, the report remained "page 1 of 1".
Because there is no serious ancestors overview, only the descendants report will ever be extensive enough to need an index, but it does not support an index. It is a just a chart drawing, like the pedigree chart.
Generation of this larger report is slow, it does not take a few seconds, but many minutes, hours even. After about half an hour, there was still no report, but Hereditree was already using more than 600 MB. If I had not upgraded my system from 1 to 2 GB or RAM some month ago, the system would be trashing. The Windows Task Manager showed Hereditree as not responding, but I allowed the program to continue. After more than an hour, there was still no report. After 1½ hours, there was still no report, and I decided to kill the program.
For comparison, I asked PAF to create a textual descendants overview. It took PAF less than twenty seconds to show me a 192-page overview complete with an alphabetical index for more than twelve hundred individuals. And when I asked for a chart similar to the one Hereditree was supposed to generate, it took just two seconds to generate a preview of 44 pages. These two quick PAF tests were both done on my current database, which is larger than the one imported into Hereditree.
One important view that Hereditree lacks is a person list. Its "Advanced Reports" allow you to create a list, but you can not double-click a person to go to that record.
Hereditree uses the standard File dialogs. To export a GEDCOM, you only need to choose a file name.
If you have not filled in the submitter, the program will ask you to provide your details before exporting, but you can continue without providing these. If you do provide the submitter details, Hereditree will not remember these, but keep asking you for it every time you export your file. That user interface blunder becomes annoying pretty fast.
The GEDCOM export is remarkably slow. So slow, that you count along as it displays how many individuals it has exported so far. Maybe 2 or 3 per second.
The help file claims that the evaluation version does not allow exporting to GEDCOM. That would be stupid, but luckily the help file is wrong. The GEDCOM export function works just fine. That erroneous statement seems to be the only thing the help file has to say about GEDCOM.
The File dialog box should have been expanded with an option to ask me what character encoding I want to use. It does not ask that question, so I expected to find UTF-8, ANSEL or even ANSI, but writes IBMPC instead. This is new program, so it should support GEDCOM version 5.5, and the GEDCOM 5.5 specification clearly states "The IBMPC character set is not allowed.". It is even italicised, and followed by the explanation that "This character set cannot be interpreted properly without knowing which code page the sender was using.".
Perhaps Hereditree does not support GEDCOM 5.5. The header does not include the mandatory GEDCOM version number, and that the one item in the help file about GEDCOM spells it "Gedcom" (not fully capitalised as it should be) does not exactly reflect that they bothered to study the GEDCOM specification.
This is quite problematic. A GEDCOM import routine should recognise any GEDCOM without a version number as GEDCOM version 3 or earlier, and that would rules out all GEDCOM tags introduced since.
Supporting IBMPC in a new Win32 application is so weird that I wondered whether it is right at all. A few quick tests with accented characters convinced me that it actually exporting Windows ANSI (Windows code page 1252) instead. Thus, Hereditree writes an ANSI GEDCOM, but with a GEDCOM header claiming it is an IBMPC GEDCOM. The header misidentifies the character encoding used. That is a fundamental error that, luckily, only a few genealogy programs make.
The GEDCOM import displays an animated graphic, a progress bar and a running
count of the number of imported persons, followed by a count of imported
relations and finally a count of indexed (person) records.
Annoyingly, the import dialog is a modal dialog box without a title bar, so you
cannot move it aside (Tip: Use the Task Manager to minimise it). On small files,
the person count increments just to fast to see every number pass, which
suggests that it is just above 10 persons per second. The third and final step
of indexing is the fastest import step by far.
Importing a small GEDCOM file of approximately one megabyte, containing 4862 individuals takes 6 minutes and 50 seconds. That is 4862 persons in 410 seconds, about 11,86 individuals per second. That is slow.
Rather optimistically assuming a linear import speed, importing a file with
100.000 individuals would take 100.000 ÷ 4862
× 410 = 8432,7 seconds = 140 minutes and 32,7
seconds - nearly one and a half hour.
When I actually started that test, it seemed to import at about one person per
second, and with every increase of the counter, the memory usage jumped a few
kilobytes. After almost and and a half hours, the program has imported not much
more than 15.000 individuals. It took just over an hour and fifty minutes to
import one quarter of the file, 25.000 individuals, and memory usage was already
approaching 200 MB. A few minutes later , the import that had started at one
individual per second had speeded up to the roughly 10 individuals per second it
managed for smaller files.
Import took more than four hours. When index count on the progress box was one record shy of all records, the hard drive rattled a lot, before it the box disappeared. The program was apparently writing the index it had just created.
According to the Task Manager, is memory usage peaked at some 425 MB. Alas, this usage did not drop back to something more reasonable when the import was done. Apparently, this usage does not reflect temporary import needs, but permanent program needs.
A 38+ MB GEDCOM file with 100.069 individual records was imported in 4 hours,
10 minutes and 24 seconds. 100.067 individuals ÷
15.024 seconds ˜ 6,66 individuals per seconds. Put
another way, 38.799.393 bytes ÷ 15.024 seconds
˜ 2582,49 bytes per second, just a bit more than 2,5
KB per second.
That is pretty poor performance.
By the way, I had to restart the import because I was running out of disk space. Hereditree nicely put up a dialog box, but did not let me resume the import after clearing a few gigabytes, I had to restart the import instead. With an import that slow, that is double annoying.
Hereditree did not create an import log. I checked all more or less logical directories, the source and destination directory, the program directory, the All Users directory and the TEMP directories on both drives. Unless it is some other directory, there is no import log. That means that there is overview of what GEDCOM tags it imported and what GEDCOM tags it ignored.
One advantage of PAF-generated GEDCOM files for tests like is that PAF writes an _UID for every individual. The _UID tag is a legal extension, and other programs importing it may simply ignore it, but it still behoves them to report this in the import log.
A quick look in the database confirmed what I was afraid of; Hereditree makes the mistake of importing all tags it does not recognise, even legal extensions, as comments. Comments that will be exported and appear in reports. Sigh.
An unexpected issue is that opening another database took ages. Apparently, Hereditree does something when closing a databases that takes longer when your database is bigger. I had to wait about a minute for another, small database to open. That is ridiculous.
When I opened the database again, Hereditree took its sweet time doing so, while increasing its memory usage up to 425 MB again. A look at the directory give me a partial explanation; the *.htr database was more than 440 MB. That is amazingly inefficient storage, about a dozen times the size of the GEDCOM file, while GEDCOM files are a inefficient format already.
Disconcertingly, I was presented with a MessageBox that informed me that "Hereditree Database error $04" had occurred. This MessageBox occurred every time I opened the database. When I clicked the OK button, Hereditree continued loading the database, but database errors, particularly user-unfriendly ones like these, do not build confidence in the product. Opening the database took about five minutes. That is ridiculously slow.
After a few times, Hereditree actually refused to open the database. It seems
successful, after loading the database it displays the familiar data, but then
claims that "Hereditree was unable to open the file I:\Data\100K.htr.", and when
you click OK, yet another MessageBox stating "Cannot perform this operation on a
closed dataset". Just what error 4 is, why it is unable to open the database or
what "this operation" is, the program does not tell.
I can only conclude that Hereditree is spectacularly unreliable.
The Hereditree splash shows that Hereditree is checking its own integrity when starting up, but it does not offer any menu option to verify or repair your Hereditree databases. Once Hereditree messes up, you are own your own.
The PAF database shows 11 generations, but when I try to create an overview of the descendants of my earliest ancestor, Hereditree does not allow me to navigate beyond generation 9. The individuals are in the database, but the connection to generation ten is not there.
Perhaps Hereditree is limited to 9 generations? That would make it pretty unusable. Eleven generations is not even that much. For someone I know, I have a line going back fifteen generations to Pierre Crommelingk, born around 1475.
I tried creating a ten-generation database by hand. As soon as I add a
father, the program pops up a dialog box for the mother, and then another one
for their relationship. This interface is annoyingly in-your-face and the
awkward dialog box layout with the fake buttons in the wrong spot does not help
make it palatable either.
Skipping addition of a spouse is not possible, It seemed possible in an
un-intuitive way, by first choose "Add Mother" and then choose "Next" without
filling in anything, but the program actually adds a person it identifies as
"Unknown person No. 3". This is not the same as the "Unknown" you see in
many other genealogy programs. As soon as you add another generation, Hereditree
insists on adding "Unknown person No. 5". All the unknown persons are different
individuals, and each one takes up a record in the database.
Other genealogy programs do not export Unknown. The Hereditree GEDCOM export
writes each unknown one as a separate individual with an empty name.
I experienced no other problems creating a 12-generation database, and it remained intact after closing it and opening it again, so for now my guess is that something wrong with the GEDCOM import. There sure are a few other things wrong with the GEDCOM support...
The bad GEDCOM output made we wonder about the GEDCOM import. A quick test confirmed my worst suspicion: Hereditree imports ANSEL GEDCOM files as if they are Windows ANSI GEDCOM files. The results for an UTF-8 GEDCOM were no better.
This program bluntly ignores the character encoding specified in the GEDCOM header, and imports every GEDCOM as if it was Windows ANSI. It does not even issue a warning. Seriously messed up names are the result.
The Hereditree web site makes ten claims about its software. Claim number one
is that Hereditree shows five generations at once. I already remarked that the
screen really shows four generations.
Claim number two and tree, that all children and all siblings are visible, can
be seen as just one feature for two different generations, but more importantly,
the claim are correct, and this feature is handy. In fact, it is something I
often long for in other programs.
Feature number four is that a view that might be larger than windows that
contains it is scrollable, and feature five that source quality is colour coded.
I utterly fail to grasp why I should be impressed by either.
Feature six is the disingenuously called "Smart Search", which I would call Dumb Search. Hereditree tries to sell this by remarking how great it is that a search for "Mary" brings up "Rosemary" too. I want you to consider how annoying it is that each search for "Mary" will bring up "Rosemary" too, and that you can not even specify case-sensitivity.
Feature 7 is centralised census information. That may sound nice, but I
wonder how necessary this feature would be if Hereditree supported true citation
of sources found in repositories to begin with. The specialised feature may be
nice, but Hereditree would be a better program if it had a proper implementation
of the general feature instead.
Feature 8 is centralised picture storage. Well, it is nice that pictures are
stored in the database, but when I export the entire database to GEDCOM, the
images are not exported with the data.
Number 9 is "Total Data Portability". That claim is misleading at best. The way Hereditree explains this claim, it seems nothing but a way to repeat feature 8 in different words, to translate the simple fact that all data is in a single file into yet another claim. Truth is that Hereditree’s GEDCOM support is so poor that there is hardly any data portability at all.
Number 10 is Software Assurance, which means free updates for 12 months. That may sound nice, but it is not that great at all. Most commercial software comes with free updates until the next major version, and more often than not there is considerably more than 12 months between major versions.
Hereditree appears to have been written in Borland Delphi and to be using NexusDB for its its databases.
Hereditree likes to claim their program is easy to navigate and I do not entirely disagree, but they violate user interface guidelines and common sense in so many ways that the program is actually a bit of a user interface puzzle, and the main view is almost impossible to not navigate. It becomes annoying even before you’ve figured out what menu is where.
GEDCOM import is slow. The absence of an import log is highly unprofessional. Hereditree does not respect your database, but modifies it by adding an ordinary comment for each tag it does not recognise, even when these tags are perfectly legal GEDCOM extensions it should ignore. It does not warn that it modifies your database and offers no way to remove the additional comment. They will show up in reports and GEDCOM export. This makes the program unusable for all but very small files, where you still can be bothered to remove the comments it inserted.
Even more worrisome is that my database was not imported correctly, that I experienced error message loading the database, and that Hereditree finally decided to refuse to load it at all - after letting me wait five minutes for that decision.
Hereditree is slow. GEDCOM import an export is slow. I did not mention it yet, but navigating through a big tree is slow too. Database loading is slow. Report generation is slow.
Hereditree does not respect the GEDCOM specification. The headers it writes lack a version number, and ignores the character encoding in the GEDCOM files it reads. It only reads and writes Windows ANSI files. It mislabels its own output as IBMPC and does not warn that is about import your GEDCOM file with another encoding than it was written in. The Windows ANSI limitation conforms the impression that this is not a serious program. The fundamental import and exports errors alone already make this program worthy of a disrecommendation.
Hereditree supports simple citations, but does not support sources or repositories. There is no import log. There is no person list. The main view is practically the only view. Hereditree supports a few reports but the only pedigree view is limited to just four generations, and generations of reports takes generations .Hereditree will export reports to PDF, but not to plain text or RTF, and its GEDCOM support is broken by lack of design. There is no option to check your data for consistency, and the user interface is awkward at best.
Its serious lack of features already limit its usability so much that even beginning users are sure to outgrow its minimal capabilities quickly. If the annoyingly awkward user interface does not put you off, you will grow impatient about amazing lack of performance, will become upset about its mangling of your data, and become more than just a tad frustrated when it suddenly refuses to read your database, and you cannot even use it limited GEDCOM export anymore.
Hereditree is not just broken by lack of design. It is feature-poor,
annoyingly awkward, amazingly slow, a tad memory-hungry, and spectacularly
unreliable.
The pretty face of the main view and its All Siblings and All Children feature
are nice, but cannot make up for all that.
| property | value |
|---|---|
| product | Hereditree |
| version | 2008.0401 |
| company | Hereditree Pty Ltd |
| website | Hereditree |
| price | AUD 47 for download only AUD 55 for CD edition |
| requirements | Windows XP or Windows Vista |
| note | remarkably large databases |
| Verdict | poor, awkward, slow, unreliable |
| Rating | Failure |
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.